As an increasing amount of information is being stored electronically, and as the number of transactions performed electronically increases, there is an ever increasing need to protect sensitive information in an electronic environment. This includes not only securing the storing and transmitting of information, but also securing access to the information. A common approach is to encrypt information using an encryption algorithm or cipher to encode information such that the information can only be decrypted or otherwise interpreted using the same cryptographic key. Managing these cryptographic keys has been a challenge for many organizations for years.
In order to improve security and minimize the risk that an unauthorized user may obtain one of these keys to access information, these keys and other such security items must be stored and maintained in a secure manner. Periodically rotating and changing the keys may improve the security by reducing the chance that keys would be subject to cryptographic attacks. While conventional approaches manually adjust the keys used for encryption and/or decryption, such approaches can become considerably more complex in a distributed environment with a large number of devices that need to have access to particular keys at particular times. Further, a distributed environment may be prone to multi-hour wide area network (WAN) outages and network partitions that could prevent nodes within the network system from having access to the necessary keys at the right time.